this post was submitted on 27 Jul 2026
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That does suggest the profit motive specifically works against the best interests of both students and teachers such that any "fit for purpose" platform is going to suffer from ill-conceived feature creep. Any suggestions on that front? I can already hear the howls of corporate overlords and political fiscal hawks at the suggestion of publicly funding such a platform.
yeah-- remove the profit motive. develop a FOSS solution by funding community-developed projects that can be shared across domains rather than farming the work out to private interests who only seek to enrich themselves. rather than selling our kids' souls out to the corporate devil, we can do that hard work ourselves and reap our own rewards which we can then share with everyone.
edit: that's what's so frustrating-- doing the right thing - the solution to so many complex problems - is often so dumbfoundingly simple
That's just publicly funding with extra layers of separation from politicians though. I'm fully behind such a plan, but I do have some concerns:
FOSS works great for the core layers, but lets be honest with ourselves for a minute, engineers suck at building interfaces that make sense to users, particularly children, and interface designers are expensive. Also I love FOSS hardware... as an enthusiast. Distribution at scale, durability, and so on are also going to be a challenge, and no having "Joe down the street with a 3D printer throw something together" is not the same as having professionally manufactured PCBs.
Vulnerability to embrace-extend-extinguish, situations like where a "Non-Profits" end up being converted to a for-profit through shady shit, means we're going to need legal defences and people with uncommon character coordinating the project.
The nature of the modern political sphere is not conducive to plans where there isn't a billionaire's toady in a suit wining and dining the school board members and offering political kickbacks to run with that platform. The platform is the easy part compared to the task of getting sufficient adoption to make it viable.
These are all solvable problems but the scale of the team needed to accomplish it would be... significant. It's achievable, but it's not going to be easy or quick.
what would it be worth otherwise? you've seen the result of taking "the easy way".
Oh I know a lot of school districts, and you're not wrong, the career educators and administrators would absolutely be on board, it's the elected officials you have to worry about. They tend to hold the purse strings in most places.
I want to be clear, I like your vision, just from an execution perspective I've seen a lot of these ideas go completely off the rails before because there's a lot of landmines to doge. You might want to start in Europe. There's a lot more checks on corruption over there.